MSNBC Breaking: Garland about to announce plan to secure voting rights!

[MoonRiver]

Stay tuned!

[hlthe2b]

1. Is CNN or MSNBC covering it live?

[malaise]

9. It's on MSNBC now n/t

[Fiendish Thingy]

2. How can the DOJ secure voting rights when Congress can't? Nt

[qazplm135]

4. yeah

pretty skeptical.

[zaj]

5. Law suits to over turn laws being past?

[bigtree]

6. because it was Congress which afforded the agency those oversight responsibilities

...including:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965

Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act of 1986

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993

The Help America Vote Act of 2002

https://www.justice.gov/crt/statutes-enforced-voting-section

cases: https://www.justice.gov/crt/voting-section-litigation

[StarfishSaver]

13. Because DOJ has enforcement powers Congress doesn't have

It takes all three branches of government to protect voting rights.

[Fiendish Thingy]

17. But DOJ can only enforce laws already passed, and more importantly, upheld by SCOTUS

Are there voting rights laws currently on the books that, if enforced aggressively, would thwart the Jim Crow 2.0 laws currently being passed by states?

[StarfishSaver]

18. Yes

They aren't as strong as they were before Shelby, but they're still there.

The Voting Rights Act is still the law. The Act's preclearance provision, which provided a very robust proactive method for preventing the suppression of voting rights, was gutted by the Supreme Court. But other sections of the act that allow for individual lawsuits to be brought is still in place.

That's one of the things that Merrick Garland talked about today - the fact that the preclearance provision is gone means they must rely on the other provisions for bringing lawsuits case by case and state by state, which is really hard, but doable. You may have heard him say "We're going to need a lot more lawyers." That's what he was talking about.

[Fiendish Thingy]

21. Will the courts allow suits to proceed for laws not yet implemented?

I mean, if no election has yet been held in a state with new Jim Crow laws, who has been injured, who would the plaintiff be?

IANAL, this is an honest question.

[StarfishSaver]

22. Yes - Injunctive relief is possible

Several suits have already been filed.

[PortTack]

7. Voting is considered a civil right and protected by the constitution

Kristen Clarke recently appointed to the civil rights division of the doj is the perfect person for this challenge

Specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits states from taking away their citizens’ rights without due process of law. One such right, of course, is the right to vote. And the Supreme Court has made clear many times, in more than a hundred years’ worth of precedents, that the constitutional right to vote does not just mean the right to put a ballot in a box, but also the right to have that ballot counted toward determining the election’s results. For a state legislature to invalidate a popular election would be equivalent to simply refusing to count the citizens’ votes. The Constitution unambiguously prohibits disenfranchising any eligible voters, much less an entire state’s worth.

More at the link
https://www.justsecurity.org/73274/no-state-legislatures-cannot-overrule-the-popular-vote/

[brooklynite]

23. Yes and no...

The Constitution grants States the absolute right to decide how Electors for President are selected.

[PortTack]

25. They can decide how they are selected, but not the actual selection of said electors

Each party selects electors

This from a SCOTUS decision 7/2020

And second, the Court’s decision reinforces the validity of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Under National Popular Vote, states that combine for at least 270 electoral votes agree to award their electors to the presidential candidate who wins the most individual votes across the nation. (Fifteen states and the District of Columbia, totaling 196 electoral votes, have already passed the measure.)

In the 18 states currently without faithless elector laws, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would operate in a manner identical to the system that they have been using for over 200 years. In these states (which currently use the state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes), the presidential electors are chosen by the political party whose presidential candidate that receives the most votes within the state

More at the link

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/07/14/supreme-courts-faithless-electors-decision-validates-case-for-the-national-popular-vote-interstate-compact/

[brooklynite]

27. That assumes that the State has authorized a vote for Electors by the public....

They are under no obligation to do so.

[PortTack]

29. If they do not authorize electors, then they are in jeopardy of losing having their votes count

[brooklynite]

30. You miss the point...

As long as they decide, before the next election, to eliminate a popular vote, they’re perfectly within their Constitutional rights to leave the decision to the State Legislature alone.

[brooklynite]

24. Yes and no...

The Constitution grants States the absolute right to decide how Electors for President are selected.

[CatWoman]

8. K; R

[MoonRiver]

10. Garland said he's going to double the amount of lawyers in our Civil Rights division!

[bearsfootball516]

11. Hope to see him come out firing on all cylinders on this!!

[WarGamer]

12. DoJ can only go so far... Federal Courts and eventually SCOTUS will have the final say.

[Takket]

15. what worries me is most of these laws are DOA at the Federal courts, but NOT necessarily SCOTUS

[WarGamer]

16. Federal Courts are different after the Trump Court stuffing.

[StarfishSaver]

19. Different, but not completely lost, as we saw in the aftermath of the election

[PortTack]

26. 61 cases...60 either thrown out or ruled against following the election, even with frump appointed

Judges, right up to an including SCOTUS

[WarGamer]

28. yeah but we're talking about Voter Rights investigations led by the DoJ

The Judiciary would be a minefield to say the least.

States will sue and take it to Court.

[Goodheart]

14. Well, that's a start. I'm waiting impatiently for bigger news.

Where's the plan for accountability?

[StarfishSaver]

20. What do you mean by "plan for accountability"?